Category Archive: Finance
Barnes & Noble Isn’t Gone, But Management Should Be
Everyone is predicting the demise of Barnes & Noble, Inc. (BKS) with good reason. A closer look at the numbers reveals a company in financial distress. Sales have decreased $3.2 billion or 46% in the last five years. Net profit margin has not cracked 1% and has experienced losses in three of the last five […]
Personal Consumption Expenditures: The September Anomaly And The Fed’s 2% Inflation Ceiling
Let me make a few comments on the report on personal income and spending. Well, actually, just the spending part for now. First, there is a long-time relationship going back 60 years in the data whereby the YoY% growth in retail sales is higher in the first part of an economic expansion, and lower in […]
EUR/USD Finds It Hard To Recover As Fear Prevails
The EUR/USD is attempting to rise in the wake of the new week. Concerns about the US intentions to slap China with new tariffs are prevalent. The technical picture shows the pair is in a tight spot. The EUR/USD is trading just above 1.1600, marginally higher on the day. Purchasing managers’ indices for the manufacturing […]
Sensex Trades In Green; Wipro & Sun Pharma Top Gainers
Stock markets in India are trading marginally higher. Gains are largely seen in healthcare stocks and consumer durables’ stocks. The BSE Sensex is trading up by 78 points and the NSE Nifty is trading up by 28 points. Meanwhile, the BSE Mid Cap index is trading up by 0.8% while, the BSE Small Cap index is trading up by 0.8%. Engineering stocks are trading on a mixed […]
EURUSD: With No US Session, Our Pair May Remain Within Friday’s Range
Previous: On Friday the 31st of August, trading on the euro closed down. The single currency corrected to 1.1690 against the dollar during the European session, which became the intraday high. From there, the pair tanked to hit 1.1585. Ahead of the long weekend in the US and Canada, the US dollar made significant gains on […]
Chart: TED Spread And LIBOR-OIS
Here’s a couple of interesting charts which are behaving in a boring fashion. The first is the 3 month LIBOR-OIS spread, and the second is the TED spread. Both are basically measures of funding stress/bank credit risk, and ever since the financial crisis have attracted as much attention as risk gauges as the VIX (equity volatility index). Even […]
The Investment Boom…Or Not
Fixed nonresidential investment is rising at a rapid clip. However, there are some nuances to the headline story. Figure 1: Nonresidential fixed investment, in billions of Ch.2012$ (blue), and in billions of dollars (red), both SAAR, both on log-scale. Source: BEA, 2018Q2 2nd release. Some sizable portion of recent investment is associated with the mining/drilling/fracking phenomenon. […]
Higher COGS In China Compared To The Rest Of The World
We have combined the financial statements of China-listed non-financial companies into one for the past 23 years. The average number of companies included in this study was 1,981 per year and as of 2017, it was 2,777. China’s gross profit margin has been 4 ppts below the global average The gross profit margin has averaged […]
USD/JPY Bearish ABC Zigzag Pattern Expected At 111.25
USD/JPY 4 hour Source: Admiral Markets MT5 with MT5 USD/JPY motive wave The USD/JPY bullish bounce could indicate that a bearish wave A (purple) has been completed and that the price is ready to retrace within a wave B (purple). A bearish ABC (purple) could take the price down to the Fibonacci targets to complete a wave Y (pink), […]
